Anthropos Today

Reflections on Modern Equipment

Paul Rabinow

Publication Year: 2009

The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the "politics and poetics" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected. Anthropos Today represents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap.

Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools--"modern equipment"--to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change.

Anthropos Today crystallizes Rabinow's previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries.

Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a "contingent practice" must be developed that focuses on "events of problematization." Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today.

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgment

...I wrote this book in 2001–2, during my tenure as a Blaise Pascal
International Research Chair at the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure in
Paris. Foremost, my gratitude goes to Professor Claude Imbert:
for her encouragement, her support, her graciousness, her learning,
and her philosophic dissidence...

Introduction Ethos, Logos, and Pathos

...This book is proposed as a meditation on Michel Foucault’s
claim that “equipment is the medium of transformation of logos
into ethos.” A good deal of work is required, however, to grasp
what such a claim might mean. The difficulty in part lies in the
fact that the terms “equipment” and “meditation” are used...

Chapter 1 Midst Anthropology’s Problems

...The doubling of a
transcendental subject and an empirical object and their dynamic
and unstable relations defined the form of this being. In 1966,
Foucault held an epochal view of Man and of modernity. In his...

Chapter 2 Method

...Max Weber’s classic essay “Objectivity in Social Science and Social
Policy” has received much critical attention in the Weber literature,
as it is one of his few sustained statements about conceptual
and methodological issues. It was drafted as Weber was writing...

Chapter 3 Object

...is integrally related to Foucault’s changing understanding of
thinking. In 1969 he was nominated for appointment to the Coll`
ege de France and as part of the standard selection process was
obliged to present a research project and to propose a name for
the chair he would occupy. Foucault named...

Chapter 4 Mode

...The essays in the book provide essential
background for situating a temporal mode of our modernity. Koselleck’s
erudition, like that of his contemporary, Hans Blumenberg,
is focused on the history of discursive figures and concepts.
Koselleck is the founder of a method and school devoted...

Chapter 5 Form

...The anthropology that concerns me is one that is practically and
essentially mediated by a form of actual experience. There have
been different names given to the practice that grounds anthropology
in empirical work. The names from the past—fieldwork,
participant observation—are no longer adequate to the practice...

Chapter 6 Discontents and Consolations

...During the course of his essay Sloterdijk asks what seem to me to
be two rather different questions, each addressed to a particular
kind of problem. At one point Sloterdijk asks whether there is
still a “dignity of the human being which merits expression in
philosophic reflection...

Chapter 7 Demons and Durcharbeiten

...After a seminar in Heidelberg in December 2001 at which I had
presented a version of the previous chapter, my gracious host,
Halldo´ r Stefansson, asked me why the part of the paper that
dealt with discontents and consolations had stopped in the past...

Conclusion From Progress to Motion

...Not only do these partial
perspectives come together in a common space but they are reconciled
with each other. From the absolute “point of view” of
which only God is capable, the world appears as a unified and
unitary spectacle. Leibniz’s God is this “view without a point of...

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